Theodor von der Pfordten

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Theodor von der Pfordten (born May 14, 1873 in Bayreuth , † November 9, 1923 in Munich ) was a German Supreme Court Judge at the Bavarian Supreme Court . As one of the participants in the Hitler putsch , who was fatally injured in front of the Feldherrnhalle , he was subsequently portrayed as a political martyr (" blood witness ") by the Nazi propaganda .

Live and act

The putschists killed on November 9, 1923 were honored between 1933 and 1945 as " martyrs of the movement " and at the same time instrumentalized by Nazi propaganda ; vd Pfordten 2nd row from the top, 2nd from the left.

The son of German Freiherr von der Pfordten (1830–1915), royal councilor and senior public prosecutor at the Supreme Court, and Elise, née Schäffer (* 1841), grew up in Augsburg and joined the St. Anna high school in Augsburg in the 1890/91 school year to the Munich Maximiliansgymnasium . Here he passed the Abitur in 1891 - with Hermann Geib , among others . He stated that he would like to study "Philology" for the annual report. Due to excellent ratings, he received a scholarship from the Maximilianeum and studied law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich from 1892 to 1896 .

In 1898 he passed the state examination, was appointed magistrate at Munich District Court I in 1900 and second public prosecutor in 1902. In 1904 he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice , where he stayed with a short break at the Munich Regional Court I from 1908 until 1918/19.

In 1907 he was promoted to the district judge, in 1912 to the first public prosecutor and in 1914 to the government council. Since August 1914 he was deployed as a first lieutenant in the Landwehr on the Western Front, and was slightly wounded that same year. As a result of his war injury, he was deployed as the commander of the Traunstein prisoner of war camp. “Bad things are said to have happened there, especially with Russian prisoners. When the revolution broke out, von der Pfordten thought it advisable to stay hidden for a while. ”( Max Friedlaender ) On May 1, 1919, he was appointed senior judge at the Bavarian Supreme Court. He was one of the closest acquaintances of the later Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner since his days in the Maximilianeum . He was also editor of the magazine for justice in Bavaria . In addition, he published articles on various topics, such as The Officials ideal in Plato and its significance for the present , "Appeal to the educated German blood " and The world historical sense of the völkisch movement .

In October 1923, von der Pfordten contributed to an expert opinion in which it was argued that Section 22 of the Reich Press Act did not apply to publications in foreign newspapers and that, in the Fechenbach case, the statute of limitations for the act could not be assumed.

Actually a German national , von der Pfordten supported the NSDAP early on , but mostly not in public. On the evening of November 6, 1923, he and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Adolf Hitler had taken part in a meeting on the impending putsch.

After von der Pfordten had been shot dead in the failed coup attempt, an “emergency constitution” was found in his coat pocket, which was apparently intended as a provisional Reich constitution for the “national dictatorship” planned by Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff. It was probably a variant of a document originally written by Heinrich Claß or created in his environment ( Pan-German Association and others), which had been written by the Wiking Association and supplemented in its present form by a court order. Von der Pfordten was involved in drafting it in his office on Lenbachplatz together with, among others, Hitler and Karl Alexander von Müller (and, according to his memories, Gottfried Feder and Karl August Fischer ) in the summer of 1923. The 25-point program of the NSDAP is said to have been decisive for the drafting .

The “emergency constitution”, however, went radically beyond the NSDAP party program. In addition to the dissolution of all parliamentary bodies, the prohibition of strike activities, the dismissal of Jewish officials, the permission to confiscate Jewish property and the instruction to transfer "persons dangerous to security and useless eaters" to assembly camps or to forced labor, almost all paragraphs threatened with the (through Stand courts to impose) death penalty in the event of offense.

The "emergency constitution" was not used in the later Hitler trial . The public only found out about its existence in 1926, after the Young German Order had given Classe indications of overturning plans and Otto Braun had him arrested. During a house search at Claß one came across a version of the "emergency constitution". In 1927, the Braunschweiger Volksfreund called it the “most bloodthirsty document that political history has ever known”.

Werner Best probably knew Pfordten's “Emergency Constitution”; his planned emergency ordinances in the Boxheimer documents show many parallels to von der Pfordtens document. When the Boxheim documents were discussed in public, the “emergency constitution” was largely forgotten again.

Hitler dedicated the first volume of his book Mein Kampf to von der Pfordten and 15 other killed coup participants as early as 1925 , where they were named in the foreword. After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 was at the Feldherrnhalle a plaque with the names of such persons placed in Munich, by a guard of honor of the SS was honored. Every passer-by who passed this board was obliged to honor it with the Hitler salute. In 1935, two "Temples of Honor" were erected on Königsplatz as a common grave for this group of people. In the same year, von der Pfordten was exhumed , transferred there along with the other dead and reburied in bronze sarcophagi . Until 1945 they were included in the National Socialist cult of the "martyrs of the movement" .

In the German Reich several streets were named after him, in Bayreuth, Wloclawek (in Wartheland ), Dusseldorf, Dresden and Gdansk. In the music district of Leipzig, a street near the Reichsgericht was called Von-der-Pfordten-Strasse from 1933 to 1945, which before and afterwards again bore the name of the first President of the Reichsgericht, Martin Eduard von Simson .

The anthology Theodor von der Pfordten to the German nation , published posthumously in 1933 , which had an introduction by Hans Frank and contained five essays by Pfordten, was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946 .

Theodor von der Pfordten was married to Elisabeth (Elly) Goetz (1877–1924). Their children were their son German (1902–1941) and their daughter Elisabeth (1903–1954).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Annual report on the K. Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich for the school year 1890/91
  2. ↑ Susanne Meinl: "The entire movable and immovable property of the members of the Jewish people residing in Germany has been confiscated" - anti-Semitic economic propaganda and national dictatorship plans in the first years of the Weimar Republic. In: Irmtrud Wojak , Peter Hayes (ed.): "Aryanization" in National Socialism: National Community, Robbery and Memory . Campus publishing house, Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2000, ISBN 3-593-36494-8 , p. 51.
  3. ↑ Karl Ritter von Unzner : Theodor von der Pfordten †. An obituary. Zeitschrift für Rechtspflege in Bayern, Volume 19 (1923), p. 221.
  4. ^ German casualty lists 1. WK of December 16, 1914: Landwehr-Inf.-Reg. No. 15 (previously 14), 5th company. First Lieutenant a. D. Theodor von der Pfordten, Bayreuth: slightly wounded
  5. ^ The memoirs of the lawyer Max Friedlaender , at the Federal Bar Association , p. 72, accessed on June 24, 2013; See also the obituary of his superior Unzner: "... a task that is more than thankless in view of the nationality of the internees there."
  6. ↑ Lothar Gruchmann : Justice in the Third Reich 1933–1940: Adaptation and submission in the Gürtner era . 3rd, verb. Ed. Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-53833-0 , pp. 12, 21.
  7. ↑ ISSN  0936-6202
  8. ↑ In: Annals of the German Reich for Legislation, Administration and Economics 1920, pp. 245–269. The article is briefly discussed by R. F. Alfred Hoernlé: Would Plato Have Approved of the National-Socialist State? In: Philosophy , Vol. 13, No. 50, (Apr. 1938), p. 178.
  9. ^ Völkischer Beobachter , No. 147 of July 27, 1923.
  10. ↑ home country. Patriotic weekly paper . F. 46 of November 10, 1923, p. 3.
  11. ↑ Lothar Gruchmann (ed.): The Hitler Trial 1924: Wording of the main hearing before the People's Court in Munich I. Part 1., 1. – 4. Negotiation day . Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-11317-X , p. XXXIX.
  12. ↑ Gruchmann 2001, p. 28.
  13. ↑ Meinl in Wojak and Hayes 2000, p. 44.
  14. ↑ Gruchmann 1997, p. LXIV.
  15. ↑ The complete text, together with an excerpt of the Pan-German variant, can be found in Hanns Hubert Hofmann: Der Hitlerputsch: Krisenjahre deutscher Geschichte 1920–1924 . Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1961, pp. 284–294. On Hofmann's assessment cf. Kurt Gossweiler : Capital, Reichswehr and NSDAP 1919–1924 . Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1982, p. 502.
  16. ↑ Meinl in Wojak and Hayes 2000, pp. 42–44.
  17. ^ Karl Alexander von Müller: In the changing world. Memories . Volume 3 (1919-1932), Munich 1966, p. 152.
  18. ↑ Meinl in Wojak and Hayes 2000, p. 43ff.
  19. ↑ Meinl in Wojak and Hayes 2000, p. 45.
  20. ^ "Reichsdiktator Ludendorff: Bloodthirsty plans of the putschists of 1923", Volksfreund dated December 17, 1927.
  21. ↑ Meinl in Wojak and Hayes 2000, pp. 46, 51.
  22. ↑ http://www.barnick.de/bt/histstrnamen.htm
  23. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from February 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  24. ↑ http://www.fotoerbe.de/habenbeispiel.php?bestnr=2603
  25. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from May 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  26. ↑ http://www.dresdner-stadtteile.de/Sudwest/Lobtau/Strassen_Lobtau/strassen_lobtau.html
  27. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from June 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  28. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of May 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  29. ↑ Gina Klank, Gernot Griebsch: Lexicon of Leipzig street names. Edited by Leipzig City Archives , Verlag im Wissenschaftszentrum Leipzig, 1995, ISBN 3-930433-09-5 , p. 199.
  30. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-p.html
personal data
SURNAME Pfordten, Theodor von der
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Supreme Court judge, fatally wounded in the Hitler putsch
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Bayreuth
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1923
Place of death Munich